How to weigh yourself properly (and why one reading means nothing)

Your weight on any single morning is a noisy number. It moves with the water you drank, the salt in last night's dinner, how well you slept, how stressed you are — and, for women, where you are in the menstrual cycle. A change of one or two kilos in a day is normal and says almost nothing about fat.

That's why the goal isn't a perfect reading. It's a consistent one, repeated enough times that the noise cancels out.

The routine

Do this every time you step on the scale:

• First thing in the morning, before eating or drinking anything.
• After using the toilet.
• Wearing minimal or no clothing.
• On a flat, hard floor — not on a carpet or a mat.

What to avoid

• Weighing after a meal.
• Weighing at random times of the day.
• Wearing a tracksuit or shoes.
• Trusting a reading on days you are constipated — it will be higher and it isn't fat.

How often

Weigh yourself 3–4 mornings a week. Not once a week, because one reading is too noisy, and not obsessively every hour, because that just invites stress.

Use the average, not the reading

At your weekly check-in, the number that counts is the average of that week's readings. This is exactly what the app does for you: log any morning reading, mark whether it was fasted, and it works out the weekly average and a smoothed trend line. A fasted reading counts fully; a non-fasted one counts for half.

If you only logged one reading this week, the app will ask you for another rather than pretend that one number is the truth.

What to look at instead

• The trend line, not the dots. It moves slowly and ignores one-day spikes.
• Your waist measurement, which is often a better signal than the scale in the first weeks.
• How your clothes fit and how your progress photos compare month to month.

If the scale goes up for a few days while everything else is on track, that is water — not fat. Keep going.